The Lives of the Caesars

Suetonius, Tom Holland

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Hardback

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English

Penguin
23 April 2025

Biography: historical, political & military; Literature, Poetry & Criticism; Classical history & classical civilisation

A masterful new translation of Suetonius' renowned biographies of the twelve Caesars, by the award-winning historian and The Rest Is History podcaster Tom Holland.

The ancient Roman empire was the supreme arena, where emperors had no choice but to fight, to thrill, to dazzle. To rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world. No biographies invite us into the lives of the Caesars more vividly or intimately than those by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, written from the centre of Rome and power, in the early 2nd century AD.

By placing each Caesar in the context of the generations that had gone before, and connecting personality with policy, Suetonius succeeded in painting Rome's ultimate portraits of power. The shortfalls, foreign policy crises and sex scandals of the emperors are laid bare; we are shown their tastes, their foibles, their eccentricities; we sit at their tables and enter their bedrooms. The result is perhaps the most influential series of biographies ever written.

That Rome lives more vividly in people's imagination than any other ancient empire owes an inordinate amount to Suetonius. Now award-winning author and translator Tom Holland brings us even closer in a new, spellbinding translation. Giving a deeper understanding of the personal lives of Rome's first emperors, and of how they swayed the fates of millions, The Lives of the Caesars is an astonishing, immersive experience of a time and culture at once familiar and utterly alien to our own.

By: Suetonius
Translated by: Tom Holland
Imprint: Penguin
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 241mm, Width: 162mm, Spine: 28mm
Weight: 766g
ISBN: 9780241186893
ISBN 10: 0241186897
Pages: 416
Publication Date: 23 April 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Suetonius (Author) Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus was probably born in AD69 - the famous 'year of the four Emperors'. From the letters of Suetonius' close friend Pliny the Younger we learn that he practiced briefly at the bar, avoided political life, and became chief secretary to the Emperor Hadrian (AD117-38). Suetonius seems to have lived to a good age and probably died around the year AD140. Tom Holland (Translator) Tom Holland is the best-selling author of Rubicon, which won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, Persian Fire, Millennium, In the Shadow of the Sword, Dynasty and, most recently, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. His translation of Herodotus' Histories was published by Penguin Classics in 2013, and his biogpraphy of Athelstan in the Penguin Monarchs series in 2016.

Reviews for The Lives of the Caesars

A gossipy, often racy biography of 12 rulers of the Roman Empire, from Julius Caesar to the emperor Domitian, written by the historian Suetonius in AD 121. Holland’s beautifully fluent translation is compulsively readable throughout -- Jake Kerridge * Daily Telegraph * Tom Holland is a master populariser of the ancients ... his new translation of Suetonius [is] a peerlessly enjoyable introduction to the earlier imperial Romans. [It] remind[s] us that the monsters who, astoundingly, achieve power in 21st-century democracies had forebears in the ancient world who matched them folly for folly, whim for whim, vanity for vanity. -- Max Hastings * Sunday Times * Powerful ... Suetonius’s biographies of the rulers of Rome, from Julius Caesar to the emperor Domitian, are rich in character and telling detail – as emerges with clarity from Tom Holland’s excellent new translation from the Latin. Holland conveys ... the distinctive Roman character of the biographies [and] confronts us with a text from a culture quite different from our own -- Roy Gibson * Times Literary Supplement * Tom Holland [is] the princeps ('first citizen') of popular Roman history ... this vibrant new translation of Suetonius ... combine[s] concision with accuracy [and is] closer to the original without slavishly being so. Readers coming to The Lives of the Caesars for the first time will find many dramatic and memorable scenes to detain them. -- Mark Bostridge * Spectator * A scurrilous, wonderfully detailed potted history of 12 Roman rulers [that] gives[s] a coherent, sweeping account of how autocracy took root in the Roman state [and] shows the sheer theatricality it took to sustain an imperial image. There is plenty of contemporary resonance in this new translation by Tom Holland -- Delphine Strauss * Financial Times *